Aim is to test the relative effectiveness of anxiety-control skill- training as compared with (and derived from reinterpretation of) Wolpe's standard systematic desensitization in reducing a target fear-avoidance behavior and of closely, moderately, and remotely related fear/avoidance behaviors. Speech-anxious college students recruited from introductory speech and oral-interpretation classes will be assigned randomly to three treatments administered by student-counseling-service staff in four one-and-a-half-hour weekly sessions: (a) standard systematic desensitization; (b) anxiety-control skill training, with altered rationale and instructions, an abbreviated anxiety hierarchy, and emphasis on practice in discriminating muscle tensions as anxiety cues, cognitive relabeling of feared situations as able to be mastered, and in relaxing away tensions both in cognitive rehearsal and behavioral rehearsal of feared situations as well as during in vivo practice; (c) psychological-placebo pseudo-therapy. Pre-post-followup assessment will include objective and subjective measures of speech anxiety, of non- speech performance before an audience, of no-audience performance test anxiety, and of fear/avoidance of snakes and other small animals.